Primer series
The Engaged Citizens series covers civic participation, community data governance, and how the public governs the technology and data it depends on.
Follow new publications via the RSS feed.
Primers
Draft for author review
A Seat at the Table: Civic Participation as Health Infrastructure
Jonathan Moore · 2026
Most lists of the social determinants of health name housing, food, income, and care. A quieter one belongs on the list: whether people have real influence over the decisions that shape their lives and their neighborhoods. Civic participation, the genuine kind where residents help decide rather than merely being consulted, turns out to be both a health outcome in itself and a means of producing better health. This…
Read primer →Draft for author review
Accountable by Design: AI Infrastructure in the Public Interest
· 2026
Artificial intelligence is moving from novelty to infrastructure, taking on roles in how public services are delivered, how decisions are made, and how resources are directed. When an AI system helps decide who gets a benefit, how a case is prioritized, or what a clinician sees, it has become infrastructure, and infrastructure that makes consequential decisions about people carries a special obligation: it must be…
Read primer →Draft
Built to Last: Stewardship and the Digital Commons
Adler Archer, JD · 2026
We know how to think about a bridge. Someone builds it, someone owns it, and someone is responsible for inspecting and repairing it for the decades it carries traffic. We are far worse at thinking this way about digital infrastructure, the shared software, data, and platforms that increasingly carry public life. We celebrate the launch and forget the upkeep, and then act surprised when a critical system decays, ge…
Read primer →Draft for author review
Knowing Their Own Ground: Community Data and the Power to Govern a Neighborhood
Amber Avery, PhD · 2026
A community trying to keep itself affordable and stable faces a practical problem before it faces a political one: it often cannot see its own situation clearly. Which blocks are losing affordable units? Where are rents climbing fastest? Which households are one shock away from displacement, and which streets lack a reliable transit connection to work or a grocery store? The information exists, scattered across ag…
Read primer →Draft for author review
The Code Beneath Everything: Open Source as Public Infrastructure
Samuel Washington, MS · 2026
Most of the digital services people rely on, government portals, health record systems, payment rails, the everyday web, run on open-source software somewhere in the stack. It is genuine infrastructure, as foundational to modern public life as the electrical grid, and like the grid it is largely invisible until it fails. This primer is about taking open source seriously as public infrastructure: understanding why …
Read primer →Draft for author review
The Fine Print Decides: Governance and Procurement as Infrastructure Policy
Adil Eastwood · 2026
The most consequential choices about public digital infrastructure are often made not by engineers but in contracts, procurement rules, and governance charters, the documents almost no one reads. Whether a public system will be open or locked in, whether the public will own its own data, whether a vendor can be replaced or holds the institution captive: these are decided in the fine print, long before the first li…
Read primer →